


Spooling Out Of Its Windows

by Fervidflowering



Category: Luke Cage (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-06
Updated: 2018-07-06
Packaged: 2019-06-06 00:16:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15182525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fervidflowering/pseuds/Fervidflowering
Summary: Claire meets someone new while on vacation, only to see him again after returning to New York City.





	1. Chapter 1

Sweat drips down between her breasts. The table-umbrella doesn’t help with the heavy heat, nor with the tan she can feel baking into her skin despite her mom’s best efforts. A car rolls by with music spooling out of its windows and unravelling across the waterfront. Claire can’t hear the instrumental music her aunt’s got playing over the speakers until it’s nearly a block down the road. She watches it roll past and that’s when her aunt comes up behind her. 

"You need to go out and have fun. You're scaring alla my customers away."

"Excuse me?" Family. Didn't her and her mom take this trip to get away from them? Claire turns to eye her aunt in the doorway, flowered apron vibrant in the sun and hands set on her hips. There are a couple other people outside of the restaurant, but not so many to flood the outdoor patio. There’s one man at a table by himself. 

"You heard me. Skat! Come back when you're not so sour. Reggie can come with you. Reggie! Take a break! Walk your cousin around. Don't! You roll your eyes at me! I don't care how old you are!" Her aunt rolls back into the restaurant to berate her son, his voice rising to meet her octaves. Claire lets a smile out into the heat and leans back in her chair, eyes back on the waterfront. The instrumental music hums over the other conversations happening around the patio. Can’t block out the raucous debate currently happening inside though.

"Family ah deh best, uh?" The man alone at his table is smiling at her, slow and easy. Her lips return the look. 

"They keep you on your toes, that's for sure." They both turn to look at the doorway when voices rise even higher. Claire rolls her eyes back to his. This umbrella really isn't helping with the heat.

"Yuh here on vacation?" He asks.

"Yeah, from Cuba. How about you?"

"Cuba?" 

"Family. I'm from New York City though. Have you been?"

"Hmm, fah a time. Mi had some business dyere. Dem call mi Johnny." And that's when he gets up and walks over to her little table under the umbrella, his hand out for hers to shake.

"Claire. Though, I'm guessing you’d already heard that." She shakes his hand, eyes on his blue ones. She thinks both of their smiles stretch a little wider as they maintain eye contact.

"Wah gwaan, Claire?"

"Nothing much yet, Johnny."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eh, I know he introduces himself as Bushmaster when folks ask for his name up in NYC, but I feel like - on a civilian level, when he's just talking to someone - he doesn't come out and say 'Hi my name is Bushmaster, how're u doin?'


	2. Chapter 2

She smells some nasty cologne he’s drowned himself in - like new leather and some kind of herb. “Luke, you’ve been brushing me off for forever! I get that things-” Her hands are clenched tight at her sides and she’s thinking of getting closer to him - to somehow reason with him with her hands - when the door behind her pops open. Luke’s eyes - warm, hot, and wearing every emotion he’s got for the world to see - leave hers and turn hard as his abalone-infused skin. A sigh, a lick of her lips, and she feels like she’s lost him all over again. She glances behind her, expecting Sugar, and staring when it’s not. 

“Dis ah how yuh run Harlem now, uh?” In he walks - swagger oozing off him and his fitted blue suit - like he owns the place. Claire wants to pinch herself as his eyes find hers before swimming across the walls of the roost. There’s a grin resting on his lips when he finally makes eye contact with Luke as he sits on the couch behind Claire.

Luke steps toward John, his fists at his side and his voice threatening to roll into full out hostility.

“You were never s’posed to come back here.” His voice tangles with the heavy base from downstairs, blurs with the burr, passing itself off as white noise. Claire cuts him off before he can take more than a step forward. John just watches the exchange before speaking back.

“An yet - ‘ere mi am.” Blue eyes observe the two of them, notes how once Luke stopped leaning toward himself, Claire’s hand left the new King of Harlem’s arm. And then he saw her face full on for the first time in months. Her eyes narrowed, lips pouting just enough. She looks good in the club dress she poured herself into for the night.

“You’ve got to be shitting me. You two know each other?” 

Johnny shows his teeth. “Mi ah as surprised as you ah, Claire. But nuh unhappy.” Especially since Luke Cage looks between the two of them with increasing unease. 

“Wait, you know Bushmaster?” Eyebrows high, he can’t keep the surprise from his voice.

“Bushmaster? You’re Bushmaster?” Johnny spreads his hands at Claire’s look. She feels hot and cold. He’d terrorized her home almost as badly as Frank Castle had just a few years ago. He’d been a person with powers and her mother’s curse’d followed her even out of New York City. “Of fucking course you are.”

“Claire, how the hell do you know him?” The crowd’s noise rises downstairs. 

“Wouldn’t yah like tah know.” She glares at him before looking back at Luke. 

“We met while I was on vacation.” Her arms curl around her stomach and she turns her back to the two of them. Everything’d turned on its head. Both men watch her back a moment, before John opens his mouth to speak.

“Luke Cage, yah got danger comin’ upon yah.” Harlem’s King grimaces. 

“When don’t I? If that’s all you have to say to me, you can leave now. Claire and I need to talk.” His eyes stay on Bushmaster, not seeing Claire turn back around to glare at his words.

“Oh, now you want to talk?” Anger bubbles in her chest, stews there. It feels like flames licking up her bones. John doesn’t help it.

“Mmm, gwaan.” John waves a hand between Claire and Luke. Smiles at the show.

“Get. Out.” Luke growls. Claire isn’t close enough to reach him as he stomps toward Bushmaster. Him on the couch tenses, but still sets his chin up.

“Luke! What the hell is your problem?” Neither man looks at her. A threat seems to rise up before both of them. Tentative and unstable, they’d dealt blows on the same side before, but not before they’d also tried to destroy the other. 

“My problem is him.” And there is something there, in his voice. Something wrong that rolls up Claire’s spine and sits at the base of her skull and starts gnawing. He continues, eyes still on him with the tight blue suit. 

“You weren’t here, Claire. You ran out. But when he was here?” That thing at the base of the skull seems to break something. She bites her lip. “He tore Harlem apart. And his shit reached into the other boroughs, too. He’s as bad as Mariah ever was.”

Luke and John have eyes only for one another. And Claire knows she’s just watching another Matt on a suicide mission staring down his enemy without realizing how often he is overstepping a line. A line that the Good Guys? They aren’t supposed to cross. She reaches down to grab her purse before she speaks. Swallows before the gnawing thing manages to rip up her vocal chords.

“He’s not the one sitting in Harlem’s Paradise, Luke, holding court.” Both of them look at her then. She stares Luke down. The room rocks with the crowd’s roar below. A club night - heavy and fast and banging outside the window. An outlet where all the teenagers wanting to get a drink can do so without running into trouble outside the home’s walls. Safe in Harlem, they’ll stay. 

“I am doing the best I can by my community, Claire! He’s a murderer!” Luke flounders for a moment before pulling himself back, trying to hide his emotions. But, man, is he all out of practice.

“And so are your business partners, Luke. And yet, you host them! Night after night after night. I see them rolling up in here. Getting treated just like Mariah or Cottonmouth would have treated them. What are you doing here, Luke?” It’s not about John. This hot, molten thing and that gnawing at the back of her neck. It’s just been bubbling under the surface until she could finally get a moment alone with him. What is he doing here? This isn’t how the night was supposed to go. These things never do. 

And now his eyes are as hard as the abalone in his skin as he looks at her. 

It would have hurt less if he’d yelled.

“You don’t get it, Claire. Get out.” He looks like someone else is riding his body as he turns and looks down his nose at Bushmaster. Sneers. “I don’t want you coming back to Harlem’s Paradise. Ever. Now get teh fuck out of here and go back home to Jamaica.”

“Nah, mi came here fah a reason, Luke Cage. Mi intend for yah tah hear mi out.” John’s watched the exchange in silence, cool blue eyes, a measured breath, a widespread seat on the couch. “Tilda Stokes’s gotten control of most of dah Stylers. Dem loyal tah her now. And she planning somethin’.”

Luke sucks his teeth, turns to the raucous window and throws over his shoulder, “Didn’t she save your ass? And you’re trying to get her - what? - run out of town?”

“Mi made ah mistake. She saved fi mi life and mi let that blind mi tah dah fact dat she ah Stokes. And dah Stokes tree need tah be burned down. And wit most of dah Stylers followin’ her, mi turn tah yuh.” His face flattens as he speaks to Luke’s back. The words want to stick in his throat, his mouth. She’d healed him. Saved him. Gave him the means to finish what he started. Finished what he’d started. And now that she’s playing the game and fighting for the throne. 

“Jesus, you couldn’t just stay a handsome guy I met while on vacation?” She turns her purse over in her hands. With a hand to the leather, she sits down. 

“And you want me to… what, exactly?” 

“Help me take her down. Help me finish dah Stokes line once and fer all. Dah Stylers don’t belong under dah heel of a Stokes. It’s mi fault dem are now.” His jaw works, his teeth chewing at the inside of his mouth. He shuffles his feet and shifts his shoulders off of the back of the couch. 

“... get out.” Luke doesn’t turn around, his voice mixing with the base of the club.

“Th-”

“Both of you.” He turns to face away from the window. His mask in place. “Get out. I’ll give you my answer later, Bushmaster.”

“Be sure yuh do.”

“If you step a toe out of line or kill someone before I give you my answer, and that will be the last thing you do in New York City.”

“Luke-”

“Claire,” he looks up at her, eyes like the time in his apartment after he punched the wall. “This is why I didn’t want you coming around here. Just…” And maybe she isn’t the only one with something gnawing at the base of her skull. Something liquid, something cold and warm, pools there in his eyes as he looks at her and resonates in her chest. “Leave.”

Claire looks away. The thing becoming too hot. Too cold. She sees John standing up from the couch and straightening his suit and clutches her purse in her hands. This won’t end like last time. 

She breathes and exits through the door a cool blue suit opens for her. 

The base is louder out here. The red lights drench everything. When John steps beside her, the red light catches his earrings and his eyes. 

“Am I supposed to call you Bushmaster now?” He laughs, but she can’t tell if she meant it funny or not. 

“Yah can still call mi Johnny.” He smiles. The club outside of Luke’s roost is hotter. 

“Fantastic,” she says as she eyes him and walks past him, down the stairs, and in search of Jessica. With her, there’d be alcohol. And with John’s laughter following her down the stairs and Luke’s gaze sitting in her mind’s eye, alcohol was exactly what she wanted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I saw someone write about Claire and John striking up a friendship. So! Here's one take on it. I looked up some basic Patwah, but man, this is not perfect and I apologize for it. If you've got tips or websites to check out, sweet, lemme know 'em. 
> 
> This doesn't have any current plans to be continued. Just thought it'd be fun to see John, Claire, and Luke in the same room post-season 2.


End file.
